The New Zealand falcon, or karearea, is the country’s only endemic raptor. Able to take prey six times its own weight, it has no enemies but man. Habitat destruction, the gun, and obstacles such as wire fences and power lines have all contributed to its decline. But today the timeless art of the falconer is returning sick and injured birds to a new life in the wild.

Magazine

July - Aug 2009

“It’s the most impressive animal,” says Louise Chilvers, marine scientist and New Zealand sea lion expert. The New Zealand sea lion, formerly known as the Hooker’s sea lion, is this country’s only endemic pinniped, and one of the world’s rarest. It breeds mostly on two islands in the Auckland Island group, usually between Christmas and the first half of January. But based on estimates of the numbers of pups born each year, the future of the species isn’t looking particularly promising. Last season, the number of newborns was down 30 per cent on the previous year.
There have been such decreases before, in 1998 and 2002, says Chil­vers. But in both years there was a perfectly reasonable, if unfortunate, explanation—the population had been hit by two bacterial infections, Campy­lobacter and Klebsiella pneumoniae. She has no idea what put the females off reproducing this year. “Nothing was dying, thankfully. It’s just that they hadn’t turned up to breed. We don’t know what is happening. But a 30 per cent drop in one year is not normal for a slow-breeding, long-lived mammal.”
Clearly something is troubling our sea lions—overall, the numbers of pups be­ing born has dropped 50 per cent over the past decade—and Chilvers also notes that a small satellite population of sea lions that established on the Otago Peninsula tend to be fatter and healthier than their Auckland Island counterparts, with females being around 30 kg heav­ier. Chilvers is now conducting a satel­lite tracking study that might help her to understand why. “We already know that Auckland Island sea lions are foraging at the extremes of their limit—100 km from shore—which seems to be reflected in their size and condition.”
What’s going wrong? Chilvers can really only speculate. Squid fisheries could have something to do with it. Sea lions eat arrow squid, and with trawlers chasing the same prey, some sea lions will end up as bycatch, even with the mitigating equipment used by fishers. And while DOC has declared the area 22 km around the Auckland Islands a no-take marine reserve, research has found that lactating females often go looking for dinner 100 km from shore. It could also be something to do with declining foodstocks, or even changes in the patterns of oceanic currents moving those food sources elsewhere.
But actually, nobody really knows. Says NIWA scientist David Thompson:
“The food chain in Antarctica is not simple, and assigning causes is very tricky. We know that [fisheries] will have some effect, but how that might propagate through a food chain is very difficult to answer.” The mysteries of the oceanic food chain puts any conservation efforts on a back foot. We know the cause of the decline of our native bird populations, and know what needs to be done to save them. But just because our offshore terrestrial megafauna may be out of sight, notes Thompson, we can’t afford to keep them out of mind. “This is something we have to address.”

The same forces responsible for cli­mate change are also impacting on the oceans. Half of the carbon diox­ide emitted by human activity is ab­sorbed by the sea. In some ways this is a good thing, as it mitigates the impact of carbon dioxide emissions in our at­mosphere, but when the gas combines with water, it produces calcium car­bonic acid (that which gives soft drinks their fizz), which in turn decreases the amount of calcium carbonate in the water. Calcium carbonate is a key building block of calcifying creatures­ phytoplankton, echinoderms, crusta­ceans and molluscs—which need it to construct shells and skeletons.
This could be bad news for New Zealand organisms. As carbon dioxide is more soluble in colder waters, it is quite likely that acidification will impact on flora and fauna that live there first. Think of the Bluff oysters of Foveaux Strait, of the calcifying algae that cover 80 per cent of the Otago coast, of the deep-water corals, and of ocean-wide plankton that underpin the entire food web.
But the sea is complicated, and the creatures living within it are a nuanced collection with myriad idiosyncratic re­sponses to any environmental change. The worst-case scenario may never happen; while many studies show that increasing carbonisation reduces an or­ganism’s ability to calcify, some research also suggests that some organisms can take a bit of acidity in their stride, and others may even benefit from it.
And so while the press frightens us with headlines about the end of the Bluff oyster, scientists have limited evidence of what impact acidification is having on living organisms in the environment, and lab tests have been blighted by inconsistent experimental methods. “We know how much CO2 is being emitted and how much is being absorbed by the ocean,” says Univer­sity of Otago scientist Philip Boyd. “It’s the biology that is letting the side down, where things are much more difficult to predict...identifying which species will prosper and which will not.”
One thing is more certain: there is currently no method of reversing oceanic acidi­fication, apart from burning fewer fos­sil fuels.

Six thousand years ago, our forebears in the Nile Delta realised that certain sta­ple crops could be cultivated rather than simply gathered. It was a key develop­ment in the history of human civilisation. We have just reached another milestone. For the first time in six millennia the economic sector employs more people than the agricultural sector—there are more people counting beans than mak­ing beans. Industrialised agriculture has allowed society to depart far from its agrarian roots, but again the world’s bur­geoning population is catching up.
As emerging middle classes in India and China demand meat products, feed­stocks have skyrocketed, making food unattainable for hundreds of thousands who have only just clawed their way over the poverty line. Food riots have broken out in Latin America and Africa where citizens starve. There have been consumer protests in Europe and panic in food-importing countries, uncovering a new national threat: food security.
King Midas wished that everything he touched turned to gold. He got his wish, but starved to death, because the food he touched turned to gold as well. It’s an enlightening parallel to the modern world. Money, after all, is only a sym­bolic construct, and if you can’t change it back into the real things it’s supposed to signify—such as food or fuel—it sim­ply melts away like the illusion it has always been.
The economic uncertainties in which we are embroiled are symptomatic of our deep investment in financial insti­tutions and, partly, detachment from the things that money stands for. While chasing the apparent prosperity of an export economy, New Zealand has rap­idly monetised its food production and focussed on international markets. Like ice to Inuit, we send Chinese gooseber­ries to China and sheep and beef to the countries that first supplied us with the species. Due to our geographic isolation, growers are turning to niche crops and high-value products to satiate the gas­tronomists of Europe. Midas’ warning rings in my ears—can we still feed our­selves, or has everything turned to gold, leaving us swimming in wine, olive oil, truffles and orchids with nigh a potato or sheaf of wheat in sight?
In this issue we turn to these ideas of agricultural production, and one change in particular. Genetic modification promises to feed the world by increasing yields, reducing pestilence and tailoring crops to endure drought or high soil sa­linity. Scientists can engineer grass that reduces greenhouse gas emissions from ruminants, produce pharmaceuticals in milk to prevent diabetes, or target desir­able characteristics in fruit. But are there hidden costs with GM food?
Will engineered genes corrupt other commercial crops, or wild species? Will New Zealand lose a market advantage for organic products? Will the technology even live up to the extravagant promises that have been made by its proponents? In global terms the potential for GM food is significant, but its future in New Zea­land is less certain. In this issue Warren Judd whips aside the curtain of public fear and scientific practice to examine the facts, international market perception and the role, if any, that GM may have in New Zealand agriculture. It’s a fork in the road we started down 6000 years ago, and most certainly food for thought.

Old snow can tell us a lot about the past. As snowflakes fall, they collect whatever particles are in the atmosphere at the time—dust, volcanic ash, smoke, pollen. Then, as the snow accumulates and turns to ice, it freezes with it a record of what the weather was like dozens, even hundreds, of years ago.
“So, if you find pollen from West Coast vegetation, it might tell you that there were strong winds coming in from the mountains,” says GNS Science’s Ju­lian Thomson, who is managing the team of scientists drilling for ice cores in the Southern Alps. “If it’s pollen from the grasslands, it might tell you that there were easterlies or southerlies. You might even get dust from Australia from really strong westerlies. It might indicate a sea­sonal cycle of westerly winds, but if you find that over a number of years, those winds are increasing or decreasing, and the story becomes more interesting.”
When New Zealand Geographic spoke to Thomson, he was hunkered down in a hut in Mt Cook National Park. He and his team were waiting for a break in the weather so they could set up camp on Annette Plateau, where they would begin collecting ice cores. They hope to collect them from a number of sites and from al­titudes ranging from 2200 m to 3000 m, which will be brought to the surface in lengths of around one metre, and 10 cm in diameter. In ideal conditions, the sci­entists could retrieve up to 50 m in a day, although a more likely target is 20–30 m. The cores will be stored in custom-made chilly bins on the mountain, then airlifted off and taken to a walk-in freezer at The Hermitage hotel, before being delivered by truck to GNS Science’s ice core-processing facility in Lower Hutt. The facility stores cores at minus 35ºC—the scientists who work there wear Antarctic gear—and is currently housing 800 m of ice cores from Antarctica and another 100 m of samples taken from South Is­land glaciers in 2004.
In this earlier project, Thomson man­aged to drill as deep as 50 m, about half way to the bedrock. The team have now set their sights higher—or more accu­rately, deeper. “The bed rock is the goal,” Thomson says. “We think we may get there...although we’re prepared to be dis­appointed.” Asked how old he expected the ice at the bedrock to be, he wouldn’t be drawn. “We want to get samples that pre-date weather-station records, which was about 150 years ago. If we got to 200–300 years ago, we’d be thrilled.”
Ice-core samples from the Southern Alps are unlikely, from a scientific point of view, to be of the quality of the ice cores taken from Antarctica. It’s just not cold enough. However, samples from New Zealand “would be a significant contribution to the climate-change story”, says Thomson. “There’s a big blank on the map because there aren’t many other places around where you can get ice cores—the closest would be South America. So we end up with the Southern Alps and have to get what we can. And now is the time to get these ice cores because those glaciers are definitely melting.”

While genetic modification was not much of an issue in our last election, the controversy isn’t about to disappear. As recently as the first week of June 2009, opponents won a significant court battle that will further delay AgResearch’s attempts to produce human pharmaceuticals from the milk of farm animals. GE Free New Zealand’s press release speaks of Mad Cow Disease, extreme animal cruelty and an amazing win for the public that protects our farmers and exporters, but is this the reality of genetic modification? What’s really happening with this technology overseas and where might it go in New Zealand?

In 1996, then deputy editor of New Zealand Geographic, Warren Judd, de­scribed coming across the “world’s rarest tree”’, the ancient Pennantia baylisiana, on a visit to the Three Kings Islands—a group of 13 islands about 55 km north­west of Cape Reinga. He also sighted the tree vine Tecomanthe speciosa. At the time, these two plants were the last of their species left in the wild.
Pennantia baylisiana can grow up to 5 m high, and has large foliage much like karaka leaves. Tecomanthe is a canopy vine with large glossy leaves and, in the winter, creamy tubular flowers. These days, both can be easily found in plant nurseries, all descend­ants of those two remaining plants.
However, the risk of losing the re­maining wild population was the cat­alyst for a recovery programme that began in 2005, and DOC can now confirm that five Tecomanthe and three Pennantia seedlings grown from cuttings of the original plants have been planted on the Great Island, the largest of the Three Kings. The goal for the programme is to have more than 100 sexually reproducing spe­cies planted out around the island.
But the question needs to be asked: Why bother investing so much time and money propagating a plant on an island that hardly anyone ever gets to?
Well, apparently, it’s not all about us, “otherwise we are saying that a species only has value if it’s of some direct aesthetic or recreational benefit to the public”, says Jonathan Maxwell, Kaitaia area manager for DOC. “They provide food for other species and contribute to the overall balance of a sadly missed ecosystem no longer found on mainland New Zealand.”
Moreover, sustaining wild populations protects against hybridisation, which is common among plants grown in nurseries. “To rely on one remaining plant to safeguard a wild population is a huge risk,” Maxwell says. “The best analogy I can think of is comparing them to tigers. Tigers are found in zoos throughout the world but it would still be a tragedy if the wild population disappeared.”

Within minutes of entering a classroom, James Te Tuhi has captivated his young audi­ence with tales of Pingao, how she was placed on the dunes by her father, Tangaroa, to nur­ture her whanau, the Toheroa. As the story un­folds, the Te Kopuru kaumatua reveals one of the mysteries of the toheroa’s life cycle: where and how the juveniles grow.
“The spats roam in the water for up to 21 days, then get into the huka, or foam, when the tide is coming in, and Tawhiri Matua blows the huka into the sand dunes. And who’s there to catch it? Pingao!” He goes on to describe the way Pingao incubates the microscopic young before they catch a ride back to the water’s edge on spinafex flowerheads or the wind. The children are enchanted with the tale, as was Te Tuhi, when his grandmother first told it to him 70 years ago.
Te Tuhi, a retired soldier and sought-after master carver, spends a lot of time passing on Maori lore and ecological wisdom to school­children. This is largely through the Te Roopu Whaka Oranga O Te Taha Moana Trust, a vol­untary group focused on replenishing stocks of toheroa (the endemic surf clam) alongside pingao, the golden sand sedge, on North­land’s coast. “They’re the future; they’re the ones who are going to have to look after our taonga,” he says.
Independent of the trust, he has spent much of the past 30 years voluntarily planting pingao and spinafex along Ripiro Beach near Dargaville and translocating toheroa, with his colleague Barry Searle, along much of the west coast of the upper North Island. Their work has led to a steady increase in toheroa numbers.
However, since the enactment of the Fore­shore and Seabed Act in 2004, this conserva­tion work has been put on hold. The traditional rights belonging to him as a kaitiaki, or guard­ian, aren’t legally recognised any more and Te Tuhi is waiting for the Ministry of Fisheries to grant him the authority to continue his efforts. “The numbers are dwindling, and meanwhile nothing is happening on the beach. Some­times I get real hoha [exasperated].”
As a young boy, Te Tuhi learned the lore of the coast from his grandmother, who lived at Ripiro Beach on hapu land that was also her mahinga kai, or food garden. “One of my jobs when I was a small fella was out at the beach fishing and learning about toheroa and the dunes from my grandmother. The grannies, the old ones, they had all the knowledge.”
As well as his work with children, Te Tuhi has written a book in Maori about the to­heroa, James Henare Te Tuhi: Te Kaitiaki To­heroa, which is used as a resource in schools alongside a book about his life and work.
Te Tuhi is deservedly known as Te Kai­tiaki Toheroa, the guardian of the toheroa. In 2003, he was granted an honorary master of applied science degree from the Auckland University of Technology, the same year he was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal for services to the community.
Found nowhere else in the world, toheroa are among the most protected species in New Zealand. Ripiro Beach has traditionally been the most abundant source of toheroa in Northland, with local canneries in operation until 1969. Restrictions on recreational gath­ering have been in place since 1932 and the last open day for the beach was in 1980. To­day, there is controlled customary take only, but poaching is rife.
Te Tuhi’s recommendation for the con­servation of toheroa is drawn from Maori custom, such as not eating toheroa that are too big. Excavation of middens in Northland shows that Maori traditionally left the bigger ones (over 100mm/4 inches) for breeding. “They have the biggest spat. It’s like a woman having a baby; the big babies have a better survival rate than the wee ones.” Conse­quently, to protect prime breeding stock, he would like to see customary take restricted to toheroa 70-90 mm long.
Te Tuhi doesn’t believe we will see another open day on Ripiro Beach, a day hundreds of people would descend with sacks and spades to dig for this traditional delicacy. But he would like to think toheroa will still be around for future generations. “For me, toheroa is more than a shellfish; it’s a taonga, a treasure.”

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. So begins W.H. Auden’s poem of intense mourning (popularised in Four Weddings and a Funeral), which seems outlandish by urban standards, where mourning often means a hearse in traffic, a black awning over a sidewalk, and a service slotted into a tight schedule of several strangers’ farewells.
It’s an aspect of Stewart Island life I appreciate: funerals down here actually manage to come close to obeying some of the poet’s directives. Of course, there’s always the poor soul at the service who forgets to switch their cellphone to Respectfully Sombre mode—yes, we have cellphone coverage on Stewart Island. But while the clocks don’t stop, business does: Ship­to-Shore (our only shop) shuts and a “back soon” sign goes up on the door of the building, which is both the flight centre and the post office.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum; Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. We come, in our respectful navies, blacks and charcoals: from Horseshoe Bay, down from Thule, round from Ringaringa, just about everyone. There is standing room only in the hall. The perpetually capped men remove their hats and suddenly seem both older and younger—balding, vulnerable. The silent-piano-muffled-drum thing? Well, truth be told there’s usually music. In fact, tourists walking past the Community Centre last November might have thought Flight of the Conchords was performing, given the bursts of music and roars of laughter emanating from behind the pine walls. That was Sam’s do.
Sam Sampson, aka the Fluid Druid, was a local identity who drove a mustard-coloured beast called Billy the Bus with which he showed hundreds of visitors the island over the years. Sam’s mates spoke of Billy’s scrape with a penguin; Sam’s never-ending love for his ex-wife; his rude short shorts; and his deathbed request that his ashes be placed in a paper bag, tied to Billy’s rear bumper, and driven around the island till the bottom blew off.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead; Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Stewart Island Flights made an extra loop around the bay when they took Sam’s body off-island, and his friends stopped what they were doing and watched until the plane was a wee glint of silver in the sky.
You’ll eat well at an island service: muttonbird, whitebait patties, mussels, cray, and bacon-and-egg pies. You’ll drink your fill and then some. The bar at the hall opens and mourners imbibe, and then they head around the corner to the pub at the South Seas Hotel and remember some more, drink a few more drams. Wilson’s whisky. That was Sam’s drop.
Years ago, I visited one of those spooky ghost towns in the American southwest and saw a grave I won’t forget: beer cans cemented into a plaque and the words etched pre-mortem by the dead man: Held in the arms of my desert, I assuredly rest in peace. Sam was cared for by his mates and neighbours and our local nurses Marty and Debs through his final days, like so many before him and many of us to come, and all of our graves could say much the same: Held in the arms of my island, I assuredly rest in peace.
Auden writes Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves; Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. We’ve only got one cop and no traffic, and I’d pay to see someone attempt to put a crepe anything on a member of our unruly sharp-beaked kaka population.
But what more moving portrait of respect than 300 pairs of gumboots at the door. What more moving words than—sorry Auden—the lines penned by Sam himself, a few weeks before his “do down the hall”. Vicki, the Sunday night pub quiz mistress (who brought him the quiz up until he died), read this aloud to the gathered crowd:
This is a message to all of you woodchuckers, Pill pushers, young scrubbers and the old suckers, The DVD pirates and the cutter runners, Some of you I’ve known half me years, Some of you have only recently visited here, You all know who you are, with coffee, wine & beers, I’d like to say thanks and I love you to bits, But if I said that aloud you’d all be in fits So bugger you all, you bloody good gits.

Suzanne Aubert, also known as Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, was one of the country’s most eminent nuns and founder in 1892 of the Daughters of Our Lady of Compas­sion on the Whanganui River. She was also a teacher, nurse, author, translator, farmer, reputable bonesetter and celebrity herbalist. It’s quite likely she medically trained in France, where she worked as a volunteer nurse with the Sisters of Mercy, but she was mostly self-educated, combining Europe­an botany and chemistry with knowledge gained from local tohunga rongoa, or healing specialists.
She was often seen out early in the morning with Maori companions gathering herbs, leaves, bark and roots, strid­ing over hills and through swamps, a red petticoat flashing beneath her long skirt. Timing was important, as evidenced in a treatment for asthma: “gather the snails while the dew is still on the plants in the morning; crush and put equal parts of vinegar and water; stand twenty-four hours, drain off liquid and drink.”
Aubert first developed a reputation as a healer in the 1860s and 1870s when she was in Hawke’s Bay, where she dispensed her medicines—which she always called rongoa—for free. It was only in the 1880s, at Jerusalem, that her treatments were developed and marketed as commercial products—Paramo, for the liver and kidneys, Natanata for disgruntled digestive systems, Wanena for cuts and bruises. They were locally pro­duced, the money went back to the mission, they didn’t con­tain any of the powerful narcotics used in many medicinal compounds at the time, and, unsurprisingly, New Zealanders took to them with enthusiasm.
There were several reasons behind Aubert’s decision to eventually give up the medicinal business, the most significant being the passing of the Quackery Prevention Act in 1908.
After that, the British Medical Association and its New Zealand associates wouldn’t have anything to do with pat­ent medicines. Aubert, who prided herself on her medi­cal knowledge and her professionalism, must have been deeply offended.
She is said to have returned her medicines to the river, and none of her recipes, which she always carefully guarded, remain. According to Jessie Munro’s biography, Maori who had been involved in both the development and use of the medicines saw Aubert as “not so much a mystical healer but as a skilful doctor who used, respected and added to the knowledge of the vegetation they knew, and brought to her cures and to her nursing all the power of her own faith and prayer”.

The Waitutu area of Southland offers some challenging tramping through dense tracts of lowland podocarp forests and along wild stretches of rugged coastline, with only the Southern Ocean beyond.
The route plunges abruptly into majestic stands of, pre­dominantly, podocarp trees, consisting mainly of rimu as well as miro, totara, rata and beech, and after 2.5 km crosses Flat Creek via a long swingbridge.
The track continues mostly along the beach, with two short sections over headlands, for a further 2 km to reach Breakneck Creek. The tides need to be low and the seas not too rough for a safe trip along this beautiful coastal section. This coastal route offers some great rock-hopping along the wave-cut platform, interspersed with delightful stretches of white sand and plenty of clear rockpools to fossick among if time allows. The seas off the south coast of New Zealand teem with wildlife; look out for Hector’s dolphins playing in the surf, fur seals basking on the rocks and occasional Fiordland crested penguins.
Along the track down to the coast are plenty of old, rusting relics from the area’s logging heydays. The South Coast Track utilises an old tramway through the forest, and the sleepers, evenly spaced along embankments and cuttings on the track, have survived to the present day and can be regarded as ei­ther help or hindrance, depending on the length of your stride. Further along the track, four massive viaducts span deep little side ravines.
A pre-arranged pick-up by jetboat from here can whisk you up the Wairaurahiri River into Lake Hauroko, a journey of about one-and-a-half hours. The full South Coast Track con­tinues on an increasingly rough trail for another 26 kilometres beyond the Wairaurahiri River as far as Big River; beyond here is a true wilderness experience best left to the purists.

The drive to East Cape from Opotiki is one of the most memorable in New Zealand. Here, Maori communities have steadfastly maintained links with their culture, history and landscape. Evidence of this is everywhere in the numerous marae with their distinctive carved or painted wharenui, and in their memorials and schools. European history, particularly that associated with Captain James Cook, is more strongly rep­resented beyond East Cape: the Cook Landing Site National Historic Reserve in Gisborne, the wharf at Tolaga Bay, and the beautiful Tikitiki Church in which the melding of European and Maori culture is evocatively illustrated.
Opotiki–Whangaparaoa, 118 km
This first leg of SH 35 hugs the Bay of Plenty coast as far as Whangaparaoa, in places cutting high onto bluffs and hills with views of the spectacular land and seascape, and into the for­ested Raukumara hinterland. Beaches and campgrounds rein­force the holiday feel and there are numerous places to camp, swim, fish, snorkel, dive, picnic or go horse trekking.
Opape is worth noting for the Tauturangi Walkway. Maraenui Hill 20 km from Opape offers a spectacular outlook before the road descends to cross the wide and beautiful Motu River.
Once a whaling village, Te Kaha is these days a popular holiday destination with safe swimming and fishing, a store (serving espresso coffee), splendid meeting house and what remains of a redoubt at Te Kaha Tukaki marae.
Claiming its own microclimate, Whanarua Bay’s central at­tractions are its secluded beaches, swimming and fishing, and coastal views from Karirangi Hill including White Island. Lo­cated by the ocean at Raukokore is a very attractive church built in 1894. Take a look inside to understand something of the local Christian Maori community.
Waihau Bay is another popular destination with a store/tearooms where you can get a good breakfast. At Orete Point is a plaque commemorating the fact that in 1897 ‘nothing happened’. Nearby Oruaiti Beach is considered the best on this stretch. Whangaparaoa is steeped in Maori history, with a reinstated pa and meeting house open to visitors, while guided historic tours of the area over Maori land are also offered. The beach at Whangaparaoa Bay is said to be where the Tainui and Arawa canoes landed with their cargo of colonisers from Hawaiiki circa 1350 AD.

On Saturday 9 May, a southerly outbreak swept Antarctic air onto the South Island, bringing snow to low levels. The cold out­break reached the North Island the next day then stalled, its escape blocked by a station­ary anticyclone east of the country. The cold air formed a giant low 2000 km in diameter, centred over New Zealand. Like spokes of a wheel, fronts and troughs rotated around the low centre, resulting in alternating bands of thunder, rain and hail, with brief clearances.
It was a severe and unusual storm, but not without precedent for this time of year. The sea surface in May is still relatively warm, which makes ideal conditions for thunder­storms to form. The warm sea heated the cold air, making it very buoyant so that it rose rap­idly. As it did so, it encountered lower atmos­pheric pressure and so expanded, which then lowered its temperature. This cooling caused water vapour in the air to condense and form cloud droplets, which then released heat into the rising air, increasing its buoyancy again.
If the air is cold enough and the sea warm enough, this buoyancy can drive air up as fast as 100 km/h or more. The strong updraft inside the cloud is crucial to the formation of hail because it quickly lifts cloud droplets to altitudes where the temperature is well below freezing. Initially the droplets remain liquid even though their temperature may be as low as minus 15ºC. But once a droplet of this super-cooled water touches an ice crys­tal, it freezes onto it. It then grows more as it continues to bump into other super-cooled liquid droplets. Air trapped between the droplets as they freeze gives hail its typical white appearance.
If the updrafts are very strong, hail can grow very large by colliding with raindrops. These raindrops wrap around the hailstone as they freeze, giving the hail a clearer, glassy appearance. The largest hailstone recorded in New Zealand was the size of a tennis ball, the result of an updraft of around 150 km/h.
On Monday 11 May, it was the quantity of hail rather than its size that caused trouble along a narrow strip of coastal land southeast of Tauranga. Here, the hailstones covered the ground many centimetres deep, disrupting traffic, blocking drains and gutters and dam­aging buildings. In some places the hail was piled up into drifts more than 20 cm deep.
Although hail fell over many other parts of the North Island that day, much more fell here than anywhere else. The difference in Tau­ranga was that the core of the cumulonimbus cloud responsible for the hail stayed over the ocean, benefiting from an abundant supply of heat and water vapour just offshore and drop­ping its hail on the beach and nearby land.
But the dramatic weather was not lim­ited to hail storms. The strong updrafts in the cumulonimbus clouds also gave rise to thousands of lightning strikes over the top half of the North Island and adjacent seas. Lightning occurs when small ice particles or water droplets end up with positive charge and large ones with negative charge. Strong updrafts rapidly carry the smaller positive particles high up in the cloud, leaving the larger negative particles below. When the dif­ferences between these charges are enough to overcome the air’s natural insulation, a bolt of lightning occurs.
The strong vertical motion inside the cu­mulonimbus clouds was also responsible for a mini-tornado, which damaged properties in Warkworth, and a waterspout seen off Tauranga. This is what happens when rap­idly rising air in the centre of the cumulonim­bus spins in a tighter vortex, causing strong winds in the process, much like a spinning ice skater gaining speed by pulling her arms close to her body.
The prolonged nature of the cold weather over New Zealand was caused by an intense anticyclone east of the country. Although its centre was 2500 km away, it was very large­ more than 2000 km in diameter—and station­ary for days, stopping the eastward movement of a depression affecting New Zealand. A sta­tionary anticyclone that lasts for five days or more is referred to as a “blocking high”, and the region southeast of New Zealand is the most common location for blocking in the en­tire southern Hemisphere.
The effects of a blocking high on the weather are quite dramatic. Immediately west of the high there will be northerly winds blowing warm air towards the pole, while further west, beyond the fronts and lows, cold southerlies will prevail. How the weather affects New Zealand depends on the proximity of that high. In the third week of May this year, another southerly brought snow to low levels of eastern areas of both islands, while a blocking high lay out to the east. Then, in the second week of June, a slow-moving high was much closer to east­ern New Zealand, resulting in a long period of mild northerlies and rain.
New Zealand isn’t the only country endur­ing unusual weather. During the last northern Hemisphere winter, a number of places in the United States and Europe had the snowiest conditions in 10 or 20 years, which climate change sceptics pointed to as evidence for their argument. However, for each of these cold areas, there were other places on the same continent that experienced warmer­than-average conditions. Globally, 2008 was the tenth-warmest year since records began.
And disturbing evidence of warming con­tinues to accumulate in polar regions. The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than normal and its area is now less than that of the record-low ice year of 2007 (at the same stage of the melt cycle). Meanwhile, in the Antarctic, an­other large chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has recently broken away, weakened by warmer­than-average sea temperatures.
The atmosphere and ocean computer models are now predicting the onset of an El Niño in the next few months. Paradoxically, the effect tends to bring cooler-than-average summers to New Zealand but will boost global average temperature by as much as half a degree—which means that the global average temperature for 2009 should even exceed that of 2008.

Sometime in the mid-1950s a young boy asked “Would you like to come for a ride in my boat?”, and the world has been saying yes ever since. The jet boat’s unrivalled performance in the shallowest of rivers revolutionised water transport and remains a quintessential New Zealand invention, perhaps our greatest contribution to the world of engineering. And the man who perfected it, in a farm workshop of a remote high-country station, was our original “bloke in a shed”, an inspiration and a role model for generations of Kiwi tinkerers, inventors and innovators.

We all swear, although some people swear they don’t. In one sense, swearing is benign, as in swearing on the Bible in court, or swearing by something you believe in, like a cure for warts. But we also swear in the more interesting and degener­ate sense of using taboo words, of the sort we are urged not to utter in front of the kids.
And kids, too, are often reprimanded or pun­ished for using taboo words. The wonder is how they learned them in the first place. Perhaps they are spread by older siblings or adult moles, or by parents who simply can’t refrain even when the kids are around. Children anyway seem to have an instinctive reaction to overly moralising parents or teachers, and irresistibly seize the opportunity to shock. Being told one must never say a particular word creates an irrepressible desire to say it, just as being told that one must not think of a polka-dotted elephant makes it very hard not to create precisely that image in the mind.
Surveys show that about two-thirds of swearing has to do with frustration, anger or surprise. As an aggressive weapon, swearing may serve as a sub­stitute for physical assault. Studies have demon­strated that it is more common in those who rank low in social standing, in extroverts and in those with high levels of hostility, and less common in people who are agreeable, conscientious, religious or sexually anxious. Swearing can also be simply a kind of slang, often no more offensive than other cult words, such as “awesome” or “cool”. It may also be a badge of allegiance, especially among groups of men.
Swearing seems to be deeply embedded in the brain. People who have lost the normal use of speech due to brain damage often retain the singu­lar ability to utter profanities, and understandably may do so profusely. This suggests that swearing can be automatic and ungoverned. Another exam­ple comes from Tourette’s syndrome, an inherited neurological disorder characterised by involuntary swearing and cursing (coprolalia), along with tics, head jerking, spitting and yelping. Victims of the disorder are embarrassed by their profanities, but have no control over them.
The earliest profanities are probably religious, prompted by strict teaching not to take the names of God or gods in vain. In an increasingly secu­lar society, especially in the West, these taboos have largely lost their power to offend. Oaths like “Jesus!”, “Christ!”, or “God in heaven!” are now almost empty of shock value. In earlier times, reli­gious profanities were often sanitised, as in “jeep­ers!”, “cripes!” or “gosh!”, but such terms have largely disappeared. In some cultures though, re­ligious terms have retained the power to shock. In French Quebec, the most effective profanities still relate to the church and its liturgy, as in expletives such as “tabarnak!” (tabernacle) or “calice!” (chal­ice). “Merde!” is relatively mild.
Nevertheless, religious doctrine may also under­lie the taboos against terms relating to defecation and sexual function, but these too have lost much of their impact. Expressions like “bugger!”, “shit!”, “piss off!”, “bollocks!” or “cock-up” punctuate nor­mal conversation without arousing much disapprov­al, except perhaps in some leafy avenues of genteel society. The F-word was once replaced by sanitised variants, such as “friggin’” or “feckin’”, but is now part of regular discourse and is widely heard on TV, often as a culinary accompaniment. The C-word is still largely taboo, perhaps due to a persisting sexual taboo mixed with the residues of old-time chival­ry—and maybe a pinch of feminism.
But change can be swift. In 1914, the phrase “Not bloody likely!” caused an uproar when ut­tered on an English stage, in 1956 the All Black Peter Jones shocked the nation by declaring him­self “absolutely buggered!” on public radio, and in 1972 Germaine Greer was fined for saying “bullshit” in a speech in the Auckland Town Hall. Domains of disapproval have now largely shifted from the religious and scatological to the political, probably because we are controlled by lawmak­ers rather than religious authorities. The strongest taboos are against racial terms. The N-word, for example, is not heard on TV, but may surface in racist insults hurled by street gangs. Other defama­tory terms for cultural and indigenous minorities have largely disappeared from everyday discourse, and retain a genuine power to offend.
Taboo words will persist, if only because taboos themselves reflect necessary controls over human behaviour. Unchecked, we are an unruly species. But taboo words are also valuable in providing outlets for frustration that fall short of physical vio­lence. A world without taboos, and taboo words, might be an altogether more dangerous place.

For a considerable part of the 20th century, tobacco was a key crop in the local horticultural economy. Whalers and sealers had brought the seeds of their habits to New Zealand in the first half of the 19th century, and some took to the crop immediately; the earliest Maori growers were at Whakare­warewa, Rotorua, in 1839. Governor Grey evidently saw tobacco’s potential as a source of income, arranging for an instruc­tional manual on growing it to be translated into Maori. There was some talk at the time of importing “coolie” labour to kick-start the industry but the idea was quashed by Julius Vogel, presumably because it would under­cut rates for European New Zealanders.
It was in the 1920s that tobacco took hold as a cash crop in the Motueka Valley. Cecil Nash of the National Tobacco Company was an early promoter, although there were many who doubted the crop would be as profitable as he claimed. They were proved wrong. By 1930, 326 hectares were planted out in tobacco in the Nelson region, by then the dominant growing region in the country. Rather than inquire after one another’s health, locals were known to ask “How’s ya baccer?” as a greeting.
It was a labour-intensive crop and at harvest time every able-bodied person in the district would be called on to help out. For air-dried (pipe) tobacco, the process was reasonably straightforward: the plants were dried and the leaves stripped from the plant, which were then hanked into bunches and pressed, usually with a hop press. Flue-cured tobacco (for cigarettes) involved tying the leaves to sticks, which were then loaded into a kiln. This required a deft touch, so the job tended to fall to women. One would pick up the leaves—three small and two large—and another would tie them to a stick. Around 40 of these bunches, called hands, would be tied to each stick. The aim was to fill a kiln with 750 sticks a day.
Locally grown baccy was sold as Riverhead Gold, Navy Cut No. 3, Cut Plug No. 10 and Cavendish Mixture, and in tins decorated with images of fetching women—a stark contrast to the gangrenous feet and rotten teeth plastered on today’s tobacco packaging. The
accompanying message must have been reassuring: “Does not injure heart, lungs or throat” and “Medical authorities recommend it”.

“I’ve still got talon marks in my scalp,” says Rob Suisted, who shot the cover im­age for New Zealand Geographic this is­sue. He was sent on an almost impossible assignment—to photograph a rare raptor ap­proaching a target less than 10 cm from his lens at well over 100 km/h giving the pho­tographer the smallest fraction of second to capture the right frame at the right moment.
“They’re just magnificent creatures, ca­pable of the most extreme aerobatics,” says Suisted. “But they also have cryptic cam­ouflage, making it hard for the camera’s auto-focus to pick them out against the background.”
The first pass he missed altogether, the raptor screaming overhead before he could get a shot away, and Suisted had to adapt his techniques.
“The people at Wingspan were talking about ‘airfields’ and I realised pretty rapidly that to get the image I wanted I had to start thinking about the bird like it was a fighter jet,” he says. “It was very sensitive to its land­ing zone—it needed the wind in the right direction, there had to be a flight path in and a clear exit to bail out if necessary.”
Once the strategy was sorted, Wingspan’s falconer Noel Hyde had the falcon swooping in, screeching to a halt in front of the camera, and touching down with pinpoint precision on a ponga stump in front of the three high speed flashes Suisted had assembled to stop its motion.
The experience only reiterated everything that Suisted al­ready knew about wildlife. With a background in zoology and conservation (as New Zealand’s national marine mammal advisor) he’s been working with animals most of his life, and has learnt that to get a different image, you have to approach your subject differently—and most of all be patient. This knowledge he has also been imparting to aspiring young photographers through New Zealand Geographic Trust’s Young Guns programme (see page 8).
In a few weeks Suisted is travelling back into the Arc­tic to photograph in and around Norway’s remote archi­pelago of Svalbard, half way between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. And while satellite tagging animals has be­come the latest research craze, Suisted is tagging himself so that people can follow his movements on his website (http:// blog.naturespic.com). While there he hopes to have the opportunity to photograph the gyrfalcon—the largest of all falcon species—so he’ll be taking Noel Hyde’s advice, and wearing a talon-proof hat.